SMARTER STRATEGIES

Cloud Computing and Agile IT: Demand a New Data Center

Stephen Wellman | Date: 12-27-10 | Comments

With more and more organizations moving to the cloud, the traditional data center may soon be a relic. The need for in-house data centers, however, is not going anywhere.

Two of the dominant trends in IT today� cloud computing and agile development�promise great ROI and improved efficiency for enterprise IT departments. Many cloud evangelists claim these trends could replace the need for the traditional data center, offloading everything from infrastructure and applications to developer test beds and even the entire development process to the public cloud.

But is this a realistic position? Won't most enterprises have to adopt a mixed, or hybrid, cloud strategy?

Much has been made of the public versus private cloud debate in the last several years. I agree with proponents of the middle position: Most enterprises will build so-called hybrid clouds. These hybrid clouds will leverage private data centers to build private clouds for mission-critical information, while offloading other, less crucial data to the public cloud, where enterprises can lease capacity on an as-needed basis.

But even within the hybrid cloud camp, there is debate over how much data will remain private and how much will be sent to the public cloud. More importantly, there is debate about the continued role of the traditional data center�even in the hybrid cloud camp.

While I think the traditional data center (well mapped out, climate controlled to the nth degree, lots of big equipment with little to no virtualization) will soon be a relic, I am not convinced that cloud computing and agile development will replace the need for in-house data centers.

Most large enterprises will always need data centers over which they have some degree of control. Let me repeat: Most enterprises will still need in-house data centers�even after the cloud revolution has passed.

The first reason is simple: regulation. Many industries, such as financial services and health care, run under heavy volumes of federal and state regulation. Much of their data is sensitive. While the public cloud may work for some applications�and is perfectly fine for many broad horizontal enterprise tasks�any enterprise dealing with large volumes of sensitive, regulated data will need to keep that data in secure storage. That means these enterprises will need to maintain their own data centers.

Most enterprises also feel the need for speed, and in-house data centers provide more speed than the cloud (at least for the foreseeable future). This doesn't mean that all applications require speed. But many industries, such as investment banking, live and die on it. Also, some key IT tasks, such as advanced software development or some discrete forms of Q&A, require some form of data center control.

While virtualization has improved the speed of both the data center and the desktop, it still requires storage. In fact, storage is crucial for making server virtualization effective, and it is necessary to run new applications like virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). And while virtualization allows IT to consolidate data centers, the IT organization still needs some level of in-house storage to manage all the virtualized machines.

What's another key reason enterprises still need the data center? For redundancy and backup. While the cloud can offer plenty of offsite backup options, it cannot yet guarantee full redundancy. Any sound redundancy and backup strategy will require both a data center and the cloud to provide adequate coverage that ensures the continued operation of an organization in the event of an emergency.

Now what kind of data center does the era of the cloud require? It will be more flexible, use less equipment, leverage virtualization and be able to seamlessly offload to the cloud, while being able to ramp back up as needed. In short, the new data center will be as flexible and scalable as the cloud itself because it will be part of the cloud.